In the opening scene of ITV’s new drama Strangers, Dervla Kirwan dies. From then on, the drama follows her husband, played by John Simm, and his quest to find out about her secret life. The female character is killed in a road accident, but has she been … fridged?

“Fridging”, or “Women in Refrigerators” (WiR), is shorthand for a persistent sexist trope, named after a 1994 Green Lantern comic in which the hero returns home to find that his nemesis, Major Force, has murdered his girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt and stuffed her corpse into a fridge. So begins a tale of revenge in which Green Lantern reaches new heights of superheroism, but his female companion can’t make any decisions or enjoy any character progression, because she’s been sacrificed. She has died to give our hero something to do.

“While the woman plays an integral part in the narrative, in terms of characterisation, the focus is on the trauma of the man, not what the woman has experienced,” explains Dr Miriam Kent, a lecturer on film and media studies at the University of East Anglia who specialises in gender and identity representations in superhero stories. “These things are ultimately connected to men’s and women’s roles in society: who’s active and passive.”

WiR has been prevalent in superhero narratives since The Amazing Spider-Man comic shockingly killed off Gwen Stacy in 1973, inaugurating an era of darker stories in which actions had serious consequences (although these consequences were disproportionately suffered by women). Since comics writer Gail Simone gave the trend its name in 1999, publishing a list of “superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator”, the term “fridging” has been used mostly about superhero storytelling. But it has seeped into mainstream pop culture too, particularly in the past decade as comic-book adaptations have dominated blockbuster cinema. It became a talking point again this year with Deadpool 2, a movie that – for all its woke satire of genre stereotypes – fridges Morena Baccarin’s character, Vanessa, in its first act.

Like the Bechdel Test – a device for detecting gender imbalance in movies, which asks whether two female characters converse about something other than a man – fridging is perhaps most useful for the way it brings focus to something that might otherwise have stayed as a nagging black spot in your peripheral vision. Once the idea has been explained, you realise it is everywhere. Libby and Shannon in Lost? Fridged. Julia Stiles’s character in Jason Bourne? Fridged. A woman at some point in almost every Christopher Nolan movie except Dunkirk? Fridged.

Many TV detectives, from Lewis, Frost and George Gently to Jack Halford in New Tricks, have a late wife to enhance their sad-maverick credentials. Leo Dalton in Silent Witness achieves the required intensity thanks to his wife and daughter perishing in a car crash, while Adrian Monk in Monk spends the entire series yearning for closure over the killing of his wife. Elsewhere on TV, Captain Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, and even Jack Bauer in 24 all have other halves who either don’t survive for long or never made it on to the screen in the first place.

There is also the odd fridging among the James Bond films, albeit not in the sense of a loss that fundamentally drives the male hero. A little like Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box at the end of Se7en, the killings of Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale happen late on, and are more about underlining the inevitable end point of the path the male hero has chosen. Nevertheless, they are still deaths of women that are really about men. “At the end of Spectre,” muses Den of Geek’s UK editor Rosie Fletcher, “Léa Seydoux is not dead. So in Bond 25, one speculation is that she’ll come back … and then get fridged. It would be very Bond. But it would also be a massive shame.”

“It is not a new phenomenon,” says Kent. “In fairytales, women were objects sought by the male hero. You have these narratives in action films like Lethal Weapon, Dirty Harry, Mad Max or Death Wish. So it’s interesting that superhero comics have a finger wagged at them for doing something that also occurs in wider media.”

The sheer popularity of comic-book storytelling, particularly when combined with its chequered history and status as one of the most finely analysed and passionately debated genres in pop culture, does however make it an obvious barometer for progress on gender issues.

“It’s definitely getting better,” says Fletcher, “but I don’t feel things are moving as quickly as they should. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Captain Marvel will be the first solely female-led film. This franchise is 20 movies old! It’s changing, but it wants to hurry up a bit.”

Green Lantern #54, 1994. Photograph: DC Comics

Where there has been pushback against critiques such as fridging and the Bechdel test, it has largely been from people understanding them to be strict, binary tests, rather than observations designed to raise awareness and prompt discussion. Nobody is saying that stories about vengeful, grief-powered men are absolutely verboten. Gail Simone herself – who, sadly and somewhat inevitably, now rarely discusses fridging, because she has become exhausted by endless criticism from male comic-book fans who haven’t fully understood the idea – put it succinctly in 2010: “WiR was never meant to be an indictment, it was meant to ask a question to provoke thought.”

“The Bechdel test is quantitative rather than qualitative,” says Fletcher. “Gravity wouldn’t pass it, but it doesn’t mean it’s anti-feminist. Lots of porn movies would pass. That doesn’t make them feminist. It’s more a test to see how often it happens: so many movies don’t have female characters talking to each other. And, so often, a woman has to die or be tortured to facilitate a male’s personal growth. That’s when it becomes a problem, when we’re seeing it all the time.”

If the arguments about Deadpool 2 reached any sort of consensus, it is probably that the movie illustrates how films can fail on a particular metric but still pass muster overall. A healthy, nuanced discourse can point out bad things in good movies. “Deadpool 2 is otherwise really progressive,” says Fletcher. “It’s got loads of positive female characters. It’s got very positive LGBTQ depiction. I thought it was a great film; it’s a very good-natured movie. It tries very hard not to do that to Vanessa, but unfortunately it does. She has to die for him to progress.”

Kent agrees: “In order to do things that are against the grain, the things that are the grain, so to speak, need to remain in place. It depends on these existing narratives in order to function.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Deadpool 2 fridging debate was when one of its writers, Rhett Reese, confessed to not previously being aware of the term. “It didn’t really even occur to us,” he told Vulture. “We didn’t know what fridging was.” This was startling, but on the other hand, an episode this summer of the Marvel TV series Cloak & Dagger featured a scene in which a love interest’s body was placed in a fridge, exactly as in the Green Lantern strip, except that the dead character was male and the hero was female. If we are now at the point where knowing reversals of fridging are creeping into mass-audience fare, maybe Reese is in a minority and Gail Simone has achieved her aim of being heard asking a question; of providing one more small lever that helps to push pop culture towards gender equality.

As for Strangers on ITV, its writers, Mark Denton and Jonny Stockwood, knew of the trope before they created the show, and do not think their drama is falling foul of it. “Megan [Dervla Kirwan’s character] is shown in flashbacks throughout,” they say, “and her past life is opened and explored like a book. She is not used and discarded – quite the opposite. She and her secrets are kept at the very centre of the story all the way through.” So Strangers is not a textbook fridging, although critics might say that Megan driving the narrative while not being dead would have been even better.

Fletcher concludes by citing Upgrade, the 2018 horror-thriller movie by Australian writer-director Leigh Whannell. “It’s really good, except it’s about a man whose wife is killed. Then he gets an implant in his brain and becomes somewhat superhuman. It’s a fun 80s throwback action movie, but: could it have been something else? Could you maybe not have killed the wife?”